Band of the Week: The Russian Futurists

There are times when you simply need to find something completely new and different to listen to, something that doesn't sound anything like what you’ve been hearing lately. Like that time when you ended your Norwegian church-burning, black metal kick by buying the Pet Sounds boxed set or gave up your weird Einstürzende Neubauten obsession to start exploring the early works of Leonard Cohen.

For me, one of these moments came about six months ago when I was in the midst of burying myself in 60s French music and went to my friend Jaime, an indy pop princess living in the wilds of Milwaukee, for help. She turned me onto Toronto’s The Russian Futurists, a band headed by a one Matt Adam Heart, who sings heart-burstingly happy pop over a collection of fast dancey beats and horns, all the while armed with enough sincerity and enthusiasm to kill a lesser man.

Jaime started me out with the band’s second album Let’s Get Ready to Crumble, whose eponymous title track quickly achieved "new favorite song" status for me. Soon after that, I saw the band play at Spaceland, opening up for Junior Boys and Manitoba in support of his equally animated third album, Our Thickness. (See the video for its stellar track Paul Simon here.) It was such a fun time that I tried to catch him the next week when I was in Chicago, but he’d made the mistake of crossing back over into Canada for a show and border officials famously decided to bar him entry due to a paperwork problem.

More recently, Hart announced that a best of collection named Me, Myself and Rye....An Introduction To The Russian Futurists will be coming out June 12th on V2 Records. He seems to currently be doing a lot of remix work and has no announced plans to tour right now, but that could always change as the summer (and the cd’s release) approaches.